Wynn was the grandson of Sir William Williams, James II’s solicitor-general, who prosecuted the seven bishops. In 1716 he was returned on his father’s interest at a by-election for Denbighshire, continuing to represent it but for a brief interval for the rest of his life. In 1718 he inherited his father-in-law’s estates, carrying a major electoral influence in Montgomeryshire; and in 1719 Wynnstay and other extensive property in North Wales from a distant kinsman, subject to his taking the name of Wynn. A member of the Cycle of the White Rose, a secret Welsh Jacobite society, he was included in a list of leading Jacobites sent to the Pretender in 1721. He ‘audaciously burnt the King’s picture’ during the general election of 1722, when he was largely responsible for the return of nine Tories out of eleven Members for North Wales. Opposing a loyal address from his county on the discovery of the Atterbury plot, he supported Kelly, the chief agent of the plot, during his imprisonment in the Tower. His vast estates, great electioneering activity, and personal popularity soon made him the head of the North Wales Tories, so dominating Welsh politics that he was called Prince of Wales.
No speech of Wynn’s is recorded till 7 Mar. 1727 when he seconded an opposition motion attacking Walpole on a Treasury matter.
If a right of election supported by two Acts of Parliament, founded upon the union between England and Wales, several ancient returns evidently admitting the right, several resolutions made upon a formal hearing at the Bar of this House ... is to be broken through, I must appeal to the gentlemen, whose seat in this House can be secure? ... That scandalous practice of corruption and bribery I thank God has not crept amongst us, but if the number of electors are to be reduced, I am afraid our people could not withstand so great a temptation.
‘The Montgomery Boroughs constituency 1660-1728’, Bull. of Bd. of Celtic Studies, Nov. 1963, pp. 301-2.
In 1729 he introduced a bill to prevent bribery at elections which passed into law with an amendment by the Lords making the last determination of the House as to the right of election in every constituency final.
Sir R. Walpole told Mr. Watkin Williams that if he or Mr. Shippen would vote against it and bring over some of the Tories to do the same he would get £20,000 to be given to Lady Derwentwater [see Bond, Denis], which he refused to do and told Sir R. Walpole that though he should be very glad that poor lady might have something out of her husband’s forfeited estate, yet he could neither apply for her or anyone else in so mean a manner.
He spoke against the Address in 1738 and seconded the place bill in 1740. According to Horace Walpole, he always began his speeches with ‘Sir, I am one of those’.
In 1740 an emissary from the Pretender, sent to sound the English Jacobite leaders as to their attitude towards a project for a Jacobite rising combined with a French invasion, reported that Wynn was ‘hearty and may certainly be depended on’. Thenceforth he became deeply involved in Jacobite schemes, which culminated in the rebellion of 1745.
In 1741, on the motion for Walpole’s dismissal, Wynn and another Jacobite, Sir John Hynde Cotton, now joint leaders of the Tory party in the Commons, went ‘about the House to solicit their friends to stay the debate’ but failed to prevent a considerable body of Tories from abstaining.
After Walpole’s fall Wynn did his best to secure that the Duke of Argyll, who had had dealings with the Pretender, should become commander-in-chief. On Argyll’s refusal to accept this office unless his Tory friends were given places
Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, with a considerable number of other Parliament men, repaired to his Grace, and exposed to him that unless matters were in a further way of settlement, they should all break to pieces next Thursday, when Parliament was to meet; that when the question about the army should come on, he and the rest were determined to oppose continuing the same number, unless his Grace were at the head of it, and therefore they pressed him hard to accept his Majesty’s offer to restore him to his posts.
They not only released Argyll from his pledge to them but even offered to accompany him to court, and when he kissed hands
above a hundred Lords and Commons, among whom were the chiefs of the Tory party, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, Sir John Cotton, etc., waited on the King, whose rooms had not been seen from the beginning of the reign so crowded.
HMC Egmont Diary, 254-5.
The army was duly voted without a division, but next month, on the King’s refusal to appoint Cotton to the board of Admiralty, Argyll resigned and Wynn reverted to opposition.
At the opening of the next session in November 1742 Wynn, supported by Pitt, attacked the policy of the new Administration. He followed this up by unsuccessfully moving for the revival of the secret committee on Walpole, seconding a place bill, which was rejected, and voting against the Hanoverian troops. He appears in a list of ‘persons of distinction’ drawn up for the French Government in the spring of 1743 with the comment: ‘il jouït de £18,000 sterling de rente en terres qu’il fait valoir’; and a marginal note: ‘indécis dans cette affaire á cause de ses richesses mais au fond bien intentionné’.
Shortly before Parliament re-assembled in December 1743 Wynn became one of the Tory representatives on a committee appointed by the Opposition to co-ordinate their activities in the Commons during the coming session. When Lord Barrymore was arrested at the end of February 1744 on a charge of being implicated in the threatened invasion, Wynn and his Tory colleagues on the committee protested but did not press the matter to a division. At the height of the invasion crisis he nearly defeated the Government on the Denbigh Boroughs petition, which had belatedly come up, only losing it after a protracted struggle, during which the Government majority fell to one.
On the formation of the Broad-bottom Administration at the end of 1744, Wynn was offered a peerage. He is said to have replied that
as long as his Majesty’s ministers acted for the good of their country, he was willing to consent to anything; that he thanked his Majesty for the earldom he had sent him, but he was very well content with the honours he had and was resolved to live and die Sir Watkin.
He followed this by speaking and voting with the Government for the first time in his life. He supported the despatch of an army to Flanders, saying ‘that he did not doubt that all his friends would do the same, and that the whole nation would be unanimous in it, because we must all stand or fall together, there being no medium’.
In August 1745, when England was stripped of troops and the war was going badly, Wynn and the other heads of the English Jacobites sent an appeal to the French government for a French invasion, pledging themselves to raise the Pretender’s standard in the various parts of the country the moment the French disembarked. On learning that the Young Pretender had already landed in Scotland without French support they made no move, beyond pressing ‘loudly and vehemently for a body of troops to be landed near London as the most effectual means to support the Prince, and the only method by which a dangerous and ruinous civil war can be avoided’.
Next year Murray of Broughton, turning King’s evidence, disclosed to the Government treasonable conversations between the English Jacobite leaders and the Pretender’s representative in 1743. ‘The moderation of Mr. Pelham and the Cabinet ministers’, Hardwicke records, ‘then satisfied with having brought the leaders of the rebellion to the block, and having the rest at their mercy, did not choose to push inquiries further’. However, at Lord Lovat’s trial in 1747 Murray was allowed to mention the 1743 conversations in his evidence, giving the names of Wynn, Cotton and Barrymore. ‘The Tories’, Hardwicke adds, ‘at first seemed very angry with us for letting the names of Sir Watkin etc. slip out of Murray’s mouth, and Prowse, a Tory, but no Jacobite, asked Speaker Onslow if some notice ought not to be taken of it in the House. Mr. Onslow intimated that he believed the parties concerned would not choose it’.
In December 1747 Wynn sent a message to the Young Pretender that ‘the whole body of your loyal subjects in England’, wished
for nothing more than another happy opportunity wherein they may exert themselves more in deeds than in words, in the support of your Royal Highness’s dignity and interest and the cause of liberty, and that if they failed joining your Royal Highness in the time you ventured your sacred person so gloriously in defence of their rights, it was owing more to the want in them of concert and unanimity than of real zeal and dutiful attachment. They beg leave to represent most earnestly to your Royal Highness that if the foreign succours of men and arms so often promised by your faithful allies can be obtained in the present circumstances they will join the remains of the injured Scotch to be revenged of the others of their misfortunes.
Stuart mss 288/172.
In the meantime he was one of the prominent Tories who agreed to support the Prince of Wales’s programme in 1717.
On 20 Sept. 1749 Wynn died of a fall from his horse when hunting. ‘This accident will in all probability change the whole face of things in that part of the world’, wrote Henry Pelham, ‘and a great stroke it is for the King and his family. ... The cause in general must be the better for the loss of such a man’.